REUSABLE LAUNCH VEHICLE - SCI & TECH
News: ISRO
successfully conducts landing experiment of the Reusable Launch Vehicle
What's in the news?
● The
Indian Space Research Organization has successfully carried out the landing
experiment of the Reusable Launch Vehicle-Technology Demonstration (RLV-TD)
programme at the Aeronautical Test Range in Challakere, Chitradurga.
Key takeaways:
● An
Indian Air Force Chinook helicopter
was used to drop the RLV-TD from a 4.5-km altitude and ISRO executed the
landing experiment as planned.
● The
Reusable Launch Vehicle Autonomous Landing Mission (RLV LEX) test was the
second of five tests.
● The
experiment was carried out nearly seven years after the technology
demonstration of an RLV and the first experiment was conducted successfully by
ISRO on May 23, 2016, on the RLV-TD (HEX) mission.
ISRO’s RLV TD project:
● ISRO
aims to develop RLVs, or space planes/shuttles, which can travel to low earth
orbits to deliver payloads and return to earth for use again.
Objective:
● To
develop essential technologies for a fully reusable launch vehicle to enable
low-cost access to space.
Mission:
● The
RLV-TD will be used to develop technologies like hypersonic flight (HEX),
autonomous landing (LEX), return flight experiment (REX), powered cruise
flight, and Scramjet Propulsion Experiment (SPEX).
Features:
● ISRO’s
RLV-TD looks like an aircraft. It consists of a fuselage, a nose cap, double
delta wings, and twin vertical tails.
● The
2016 experiment involved sending a winged spacecraft on a rocket powered by a
conventional solid booster (HS9) engine used by ISRO into space. The spacecraft
traveled at a speed of Mach 5 (five times the speed of sound) when re-entering
the earth’s orbit and traveled a distance of 450 km before splashdown in the
Bay of Bengal.
Significance:
● With
the costs acting as a major deterrent to space exploration, a reusable launch
vehicle is considered a low-cost,
reliable, and on-demand mode of accessing space.
● Nearly
80 to 87 percent of the cost in a space launch vehicle goes into the structure
of the vehicle. The costs of propellants are minimal in comparison. By using
RLVs the cost of a launch can be reduced
by nearly 80 percent of the present cost.
Go back to basics:
First Experiment:
● In
the first flight, critical technologies
such as autonomous navigation, guidance and control, reusable thermal
protection system, and re-entry mission management have been successfully
validated.
Second Experiment:
● In
the second flight, autonomous landing
under the exact conditions of a Space Re-entry vehicle’s landing - high speed,
unmanned, precise landing from the same return path were tested.
● It
also tested landing parameters such as ground relative velocity, the sink rate
of landing gears, and precise body rates, as might be experienced by an orbital
re-entry space vehicle in its return path, were achieved.
Difference between first and second experiment:
● According
to ISRO, the first test with RLV-TD (HEX1) involved the vehicle landing on a
hypothetical runway over the Bay of Bengal while the LEX experiment conducted
recently involved a precise landing on a runway.
Three more experiments
- Return flight experiment (REX), powered cruise
flight, and Scramjet Propulsion Experiment (SPEX) have to be conducted.